A fellow by the name of Colin Eberhardt in the U.K. has reviewed my book that teaches .NET devs how to write iPhone and iPad apps. Colin’s review of iOS Programming for .NET Developers is circumspect and has reasonable critiques. He summarizes the review with a few sentences that made me sigh with relief, because they confirm that I succeeded in writing a book that .NET developers gain real value by reading. Colin writes…

“What makes this book unique is that it helps you leverage your existing skills in a way that you would find very hard to do by yourself. The similarities between the two environments are far from obvious, but I am happy to say that there are a great many! I feel that reading this book has increased my comprehension of iOS application development far quicker than a standard text on learning iOS would have allowed.”

Over the past several months I have been working like a madman on a book that explains iOS to .NET developers. I’m proud to announce that iOS Programming for .NET Developers has been published! Like my last book, Advanced MVVM, this book is self-published. It is currently available in paperback and Kindle editions, but stay tuned for iBooks and Nook editions coming soon.

After being obsessed with WPF for so many years, I can’t just forget about it. Even though my focus is now on iOS development, I still think that WPF is an awesome platform. That’s why I wrote an iPhone app named Master WPF. It contains 500 questions, spread across 28 topics, that I painstakingly wrote, organized, and proofread until my eyes bled. The questions will help any WPF developer sharpen their skills.

It’s for WPF noobs, gurus, and everyone in between.

Master WPF on your iPhone or iPod Touch

You can download Master WPF for free on your iPhone or iPod Touch, running iOS 5 or greater. The app comes with 15 free questions so that you can try it out. If you decide that you want to master WPF with my app, you can make a small in-app purchase to unlock all 500 questions.

Over the past few months there have been many odd announcements, rumors and convulsions coming out of Microsoft. It all started when Bob Muglia announced that their “strategy has shifted” toward HTML5, and Silverlight will not reign supreme forever. That one statement caused ripple effects that literally put some people out of work, caused projects to be put on hold or cancelled, and made many people in the IT world wonder…

The major concern for people who have invested years of time learning Silverlight, whether it is valid or not, is that they are about to become dinosaurs. For people focused on WPF this news was not as threatening or shocking because, well, WPF was not the new kid on the chopping block anymore. Silverlight was. Until now. Chop!

An awkward time passed, with lots of angst and nail biting in the development community. People who were glad to finally be done with the horrors of cross-browser compatibility and dealing with the latest breaking changes in their DOM abstraction library of choice soon realized that Silverlight was slipping through their fingers. Instead, a hot new technology meant to solve all the world’s woes was soon to plop into their hands: HTML5 and JavaScript. This does not bode well with people who are used to the luxurious and productive world of C#, .NET, and the full powers of Visual Studio 2010. The situation seemed grim, and there was a lot of confusion about the future of .NET and Silverlight. Certainly Microsoft must be planning to explain things more clearly, to put these fears they stirred up to rest.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Rather, the opposite happened. Microsoft gave the world a sneak preview of Windows 8 and touted the fact that you can build apps for it that have the Metro UI style using…HTML5 and JavaScript. That’s right, world. Suck on that for a while. In the future we will (should? must?) build desktop Windows apps with the crap that we were trying to get away from on the Web when moving to Silverlight. I’m sure there is a good reason for all this, but I must admit that seeing this go down makes me super-duper happy that I’ve been diving head first into iOS and Android programming. If the future of developing Windows apps means abandoning C# and the .NET Framework and instead using HTML5 and JavaScript, I’m out. See ya, Microsoft. Good luck with that.

Perhaps the world at large does not follow all of this nonsense as closely as the people who bother to blog about it do. I have heard from several friends in major U.S. cities, including New York and Boston, that there are many opportunities for experienced WPF and Silverlight developers. Brief searches on Dice.com confirmed this. The “real world” seems to have just recently (past year or two) wholeheartedly adopted WPF and Silverlight. I have noticed that it takes a long time for large organizations to adopt new technologies, so perhaps all of this handwringing is for naught. Unless you depend on cutting edge technologies for a living, there’s really nothing to be concerned about. But there is something else to be interested in…

Jupiter is the code name for some new UI programming platform that supposedly might be available in Windows 8. There is a lot of speculation and rumor on the Web about what exactly Jupiter is, and is not, but there have been no official announcements as of yet from Microsoft. I have heard tales of it being a replacement for WPF on Windows 8, using XAML (amidst rumors of the XAML team at Microsoft being disbanded), it supposedly is called DirectUI, and it supposedly will support being used with native C++. All I can say is “Cool!” and I hope that this Jupiter thing turns out to be awesome, but I don’t care much about it until I can fire up VS and kick the wheels.

Supposedly all will be revealed and clarified at the upcoming BUILD conference in 2011. I suspect BUILD will answer some questions and unleash a new wave of turmoil in the developer community. Regardless of how successful the Microsoft PR machine is at that conference, one thing is certain. These are strange times in the world of Microsoft developers.

If you are interested in reading about the great features in the Mole 2010 debugging tool, you’re in luck. We have published a sponsored article on CodeProject that shows what Mole 2010 can do. Check out Debugging Made Easier with Mole 2010 to see what Mole 2010 has to offer.

Pete Brown, a WPF Program Manager at Microsoft, recently posted an interesting collection of facts and thoughts about the future of WPF. With all the hype that Silverlight has, and now HTML 5, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that WPF is still growing and evolving. Granted, the platform hit maturity years ago, so the enhancements we are seeing now don’t have the same flash and appeal as a newer technology’s vNext features. But, in my mind, that is a good thing. Hype is just marketing in effect. When I am developing an application I would rather have a stable, robust, mature technology at my disposal.